As Drought Spreads, Should the U.S. Put Ethanol on Hold?

This summer's drought has now touched more than half of the contiguous 48 states, The New York Times reports, with no sign of relenting. And with the dry conditions threatening to drive up the price of food, Colin A. Carter and Henry I. Miller propose in a Times op-ed today that the U.S. pull back the EPA's renewable fuels mandates and ease the pressure on America's food supply.

Carter, an agricultural and resource economics professor, and Miller, a fellow in scientific philosophy and public policy at the Hoover Institution, say that 40 percent of the 2012 U.S. corn crop will go to meet the government's mandate to create more than 13 billion gallons of corn ethanol. Instead, the two argue, the U.S. ought to follow the example of Brazil. While it produces millions of gallons of ethanol from sugar cane, Brazil can change its policies and direct more sugar cane back into the food supply, rather than turning it into fuel, if need be.

As PM Editor-in-Chief James B. Meigs wrote in his own op-ed a few years ago, it's good to see the U.S. government acknowledge the importance of researching alternative fuels, but there are a host of problems with trying to mass produce corn ethanol. One of the biggest is that it diverts a major portion of a crop that would have gone into the food supply. As Carter and Miller wrote in the Times today:

"The price of corn is a critical variable in the world food equation, and food markets are on edge because American corn supplies are plummeting. The combination of the drought and American ethanol policy will lead in many parts of the world to widespread inflation, more hunger, less food security, slower economic growth and political instability, especially in poor countries."

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/as-drought-spreads-should-the-us-put-ethanol-on-hold-11215168?src=rss

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